Art History Publication Initiative

Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War

Ronak K. Kapadia

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781478004639
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In Insurgent Aesthetics Ronak K. Kapadia theorizes the world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East. He traces how new forms of remote killing, torture, confinement, and surveillance have created a distinctive post-9/11 infrastructure of racialized state violence. Linking these new forms of violence to the history of American imperialism and conquest, Kapadia shows how Arab, Muslim, and South Asian diasporic multimedia artists force a reckoning with the US war on terror's violent destruction and its impacts on immigrant and refugee communities. Drawing on an eclectic range of visual, installation, and performance works, Kapadia reveals queer feminist decolonial critiques of the US security state that visualize subjugated histories of US militarism and make palpable what he terms "the sensorial life of empire." In this way, these artists forge new aesthetic and social alliances that sustain critical opposition to the global war machine and create alternative ways of knowing and feeling beyond the forever war.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Sensuous Affiliations: Security, Terror, and the Queer Calculus of the Forever War
• One. Up in the Air: US Aerial Power and the Visual Life of Empire in the Drone Age
• Two. On the Skin: Drone Warfare, Collateral Damage, and the Human Terrain
• Three. Empire’s Innards: Conjuring “Warm Data” in Archives of US Global Military Detention
• Four. Palestine(s) in the Sky: Visionary Aesthetics and Queer Cosmic Utopias from the Frontiers of US Empire
• Epilogue. Scaling Empire: Insurgent Aesthetics in the Wilds of Imperial Decline
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Color Plates